We Came As We Always Were: The DMS Reunion
“I’m an old crow, it’s true,” said Linda, “but I feel like a hummingbird inside.”
It was a casual reunion of teachers and staff of Dunn Middle School, about twenty years after our dispersion. Linda had made it happen, of course, and it was thrilling to see dear familiar friends as they showed up: Marc and Julie, Lynne, Nick, Mac, Donna, Genevieve, Linda…these are the ones with whom I overlapped, but there were also Jenn and Debby, Dawn, Alli, spouses, and a grandson.
And there we were, a bunch of weathered old birds, with our various wobbles and wounds, truly almost comical. The campus was sparkling in rain, looking fixed up and polished since the scruffier days of our time there, and we marveled at the changes. But mostly we marveled at each other.
Because, yes, we were hummingbirds inside. And sometimes we flickered into our younger selves, reliving shared adventures. Donna and I walked through the house in which she taught math, separated by a kitchen from my language arts space. There was where the coffee pot sat with its murky brew, here is where a bird flew in and Donna guided it to escape while I panicked. Donna and I remembered the kids spread out, writing essays and doing problems, getting up to run across the field now and then, behavior we encouraged because we liked doing that ourselves. On this very threshold, someone scattered rose petals once, a symbol of hope.
We inhabited a world in which shoes appeared on rooftops, rain-slicked wooden decks were meant for sliding, and girls tap-danced side by side on a chessboard. Children smiled at me with multi-colored braces on their teeth and left drawings on my whiteboard. They told me secrets sometimes that I never revealed and by eighth grade they forgot that I existed. They read books in a window seat, crawled under a table to write tales of runaway horses and fantasy battles, and asked us questions that we could not always answer.
We pored over atlases with their pastel-colored maps and discussed the reasons given for a war. We looked at the faces of faraway children and tried to make life better for one. We wrote thank you letters, shared stories, and interviewed our elders. We surfed the Metro of Washington, D.C. and hopped a cable car in San Francisco. We found poems in odd places and shining epiphanies. Once we had a sleepover on campus, ran through the sprinklers in the dark, and fell asleep watching Anne of Green Gables.
It was fun getting emails from kids, and wearing costumes, and discussing books while speaking in fake accents. I liked riding my bike with the eighth-grade boys, time traveling through our journals, taping cool words on the wall, making paper cranes and embroidering jeans, seeing guitars in the bathtub and kites in the sky, watching our prayer flags dissolving in threads as our beautiful hopes diffused into the universe.
How many people get to try walking on coffee can stilts during their workday or have their hair elaborately braided by a seventh-grade girl? I supervised the mummification of chili peppers, helped bury and excavate bogus ancient artifacts, and assisted in the placement of scale model planets––the sun was at the oak tree on our campus, Neptune in Santa Maria. We saw snow angels in the mountains and sand angels at the beach, and we walked in silence with sixty-six kids on September 11, 2001.
Now we wandered through the science building with Treebeard himself, teacher of science and so much else. Musician, philosopher, naturalist. Treebeard Marc, who taught us to ask questions, to stop, be still, and stare in wonderment, and who demonstrated mathematically that everything that is happening is basically impossible, and yet. There were lessons to be learned in every explosion, in every blade of grass, in all the infinities from the world of tiny insects to the heavens above. On my first day as a teacher at DMS, I saw kids climbing in a tree and asked him what our policy was on tree climbing. He looked their way, stroked his beard, and replied, “I think it’s a very good idea.” I knew then I was in the right place. Now I watched Marc touring the room, stopping at the wall of tools, an intact remnant of his presence. Tools and Materials-- that was an elective.
Electives. Kids made skimboards, knitted patchwork mini-blankets for homeless people, published newspapers, learned about the sixties, interviewed their elders, changed the world with ten dollars of seed money. There was Improv or Spanish with Genevieve. Art and Italian with Mac. Organic gardening and composting with Julie. Music. Board games. Cooking. You might look outside and see kids on pogo sticks or shimmying with hula hoops, if they weren’t in the trees.
Linda at the helm, of course, she who could never stop believing. Yes, we organized a Festival of Possibilities on the Dunn campus…I still have the program somewhere: sessions on songwriting, circus performance, geology, green building, marine biology...you name it. There were speakers from every field, and people of all ages were welcome, and everything was free. It was mind-boggling. Anything could happen.
Or how about the day we brought in the gospel choir from Washington Prep High in Los Angeles, with the help of Jackson Browne?
We read Treasure Island and got to be pirates all day. We read Alice in Wonderland and were characters in a wonderland. We had festivals celebrating our diverse heritage, and a Renaissance Faire, and days when we came in pajamas. “You let the students be children for a while longer,” one of the mothers once told me. But they learned a lot too. We learned a lot together.
There were days of tedium of course, and days of sadness, days when emotions ran rampant, and middle school drama, which is very real. But it helps so much to have had colleagues who were also friends, to be part of a team of intelligent, kind, creative people who respected the students and one another. How lucky I was! The Camelot years.
Lynne was the oasis and control center in the main office, fending off mini-disasters, listening with love to a multitude of troubles, taking care of us all as only Lynne could do. I jumped up and ran toward her when she appeared on campus for the reunion. We hugged, and there were tears.
“You were running towards me,” she later said, “and what I saw was a young woman with flowing skirts and long hair blowing, and it was you, exactly as you were.”
That’s what was so magical about the DMS reunion. We all became exactly as we were.
